Libertad and Mateo are mother and son.

They live in a luxurious house completely decorated in pink and black.

All their accessories and clothes are in the same colors.

Their relationship is an extreme mother/son dynamic: dependence, sadomasochism, manipulation, madness, selfishness, sadism.

The television mostly broadcasts news about North Korea: it is 2011, and soon Kim Jong-il will die, and his third son Kim Jong-un will come to power.

The images of the subjects' despair at the dictator's death are shown with great fanfare, while Mateo is diagnosed with a brain tumor, a glioblastoma.

An initial extreme scene of Libertad giving birth to an already adult son, followed by images of the brain surgery on the boy, ferociously indicate the director's intent to hide nothing but rather to spectacularly, clearly, chromatically, geometrically, and aesthetically represent everything related to the body and mind.

Though at times didactic and self-indulgent, Casanova's message is fed by a rather unusual form and direct references to the extreme relationships between victim and executioner, and between servant and master, if not between subject and despot.

Libertad indeed compresses Mateo's life, not wanting to let him go despite his adulthood, and if he is sick, she will be too.

The fatigue of illness and caregiving, along with psychotherapy, insinuate further reasons for seeking freedom, the same freedom that will challenge the boy's ingrained habits in the luxurious pink cage.

The toxicity of this intimate relationship and the depiction of stories about unicorns and poisoned strawberries for population control in the People's Republic of Korea do not bypass the film's true theme: political power.

The film conceptually structures itself on the illustrious discourse of "voluntary servitude" by Etienne de La Boétie, on the inevitable, apparently, interdependence between people and rulers and more.

The need to feel loved and indispensable is at the base of this type of relationship, where the mother's name, Libertad, insinuates that true freedom is precisely that type of compression from which it is impossible to escape.

A psychosomatic view of power relations that create metastases in the body and inescapable cages in the mind.

A Love and Death with fairy-tale and surreal contours where each exercises the reason for the other's life: a perverse symbiosis in which the servant and the master are interchangeable.

The film is a continuous, albeit didactic, irreverent, and scandalous metaphor for power: the director confirms his extreme visionary ability as he did with his previous film, Pelle, on the theme of morality.

Presented at the last TFF 40 in competition, it is a film that will provoke discussion, reflection, and "if the purpose of art is not to reproduce the visible but to make it visible," as Paul Klee argued, this is art.

Edoardo Casanova says he was inspired by Kim Ki-duk's Pietà, certainly in the extremity of themes, though distant in formal, aesthetic, and conceptual criteria.

Here there is an intimate dimension of power and a political one: the situations are paradoxical, eccentric, and simultaneously gothic, and in that excess of pink, everything becomes dark and sinister.

Everything is minimal, monumental, and funereal, like the architecture of dictatorial regimes and more.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice